I didn’t want to write about the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, because it disgusts me to the point of compulsive rock-kicking, and makes my stomach undulate like it is full of angry sand worms, but my mother said I had to. I never listen to her, but I suppose she’s right. It’s the kind of thing I am supposed to comment on, but when the wind gets knocked out of you because the Boot of Tyranny is standing on your face, it leaves you somewhat….speechless.
I feel like a stunned haddock. It’s the same kind of dumb silence that comes over you when somebody becomes suddenly violent in a bar. It’s so retrograde and deliberately evil as to be totally bewildering.
I am a Godless babykiller. That’s what the people on the zealot, fascist, frighteningly ascendant right on are calling women like me on Twitter, who believe in having autonomy over our bodies instead of the state having full transvaginal access to our reproductive organs like cattle. In arguments on Twitter I have also been called a “groomer” — something far-right people accuse anyone who isn’t them (racist, sexist, homophobic, gun-loving) of being, i.e. a child molester. (Because if you are pro-choice, you definitely dabble in child sex trafficking. They apparently go hand in hand, if you happen to be one of those dribbling, shouting, no-necked monsters in red hats who thinks all democrats are involved in Satanic baby eating.)
“You just want abortion so you can sleep around more,” some woman on Twitter told me. “You need therapy.”
This isn’t rhetoric, or reason… it’s fundamentalist religious terrorism, plain and simple. FOX News was determined to divide America and make half of it impervious to reason, and they have succeeded beautifully with the help of Christian evangelicals.
Now, it has been decided that the soul of the human being enters the body at conception, and men are infallible, and women are merely uteruses with ears they never use and mouths that work overtime, who are about to get spanked, monitored, spied on and legally bullied the way they should have been for the last 40 years.
As a grown ass woman, it makes you want to go over to the nearest Masonic hall wearing a bra full of C-4. (Of course, WE, the liberals, never do murderous shit like that. Only they do shit like that. They’re the only ones who have C-4 sitting around the garage, just in case the Mexi-Goths come over the wall. )
Pregnancy is now, in many states, a prison term.
The one thing I keep thinking about was a Tweet I saw from a nurse, who asked if anyone had ever heard the screams of an 11-year-old rape victim in labor, giving birth to her father’s child. She had, and it haunts her still. “In Texas, already, children aged nine, ten, and eleven, who don’t yet understand what sex and abuse are, face forced pregnancy and childbirth after being raped,” wrote Jia Tolentino in the New Yorker, in a sentence that now haunts me even worse.
There is no mention in the Supreme Court ruling anywhere of penalties or responsibilities for the man who impregnates the woman, or child. It’s as if these terrible sluts do it all to themselves. In states like Texas, there is a $10,000 bounty for any vigilante who wants to rat out someone who had an abortion, and lawsuits for the provider and anyone who helped, even down to the Uber driver. I don’t remember any such largess for eyewitness reports of members of Al-Qaida on American soil.
When did women become the enemy? Frankly, I think we’ve been hated since the dawn of time - particularly by other women who are awestruck by the patriarchy.
Miscarriages, which are fretfully common and natural, will now in many states be regarded as murder. “We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth,” wrote Tolentino, in an article I really didn’t want to read.
This is the first time in history that rights have actually been taken away from citizens of the Land of the Free, and the Democrats saw this dark beast begin to take form around the Barry Goldwater era, and futzed around getting hobbled with the narcissistic differences of the left too much to do enough of anything to prevent it. Their response has been predictably toothless, tepid, and wholly infuriating.
If I hadn’t had an abortion at 19, I never could have been a writer. I was not going to carry to term the offspring of my feckless drug addict of a college boyfriend — the pregnancy only happened in the first place because the asshole was drunk. This was a child that did not need to exist in this world, and I have never for one second regretted my decision. But I shudder to think what might have been my life if the Supreme Court decided to shut down my entire creative future in exchange for an unwanted single motherhood. I would have been terminally poor, and I’d never have written plays or books. I’d be too busy working a shitty job. It is horrifying to think of so many young women bereft of any agency in their lives if they should make the fatal mistake of getting unwittingly knocked up.
This isn’t even really about criminalizing women’s sexuality - it’s about criminalizing women, period. This ought to please the for-profit prison industrial complex, who will not only be housing pregnant women for the protection of the fetus (if the mother is deemed too druggy); they will probably end up cashing in on a generation of unwanted and abused children who grew up in the atrocious foster care system, as well.
I have never been so petrified of my fellow Americans. I have never felt so appalled and creepy to be white. I have never been so downtrodden as a female. I have never hated this country to its rotten, racist, sexist, homophobic, greedy, genocidal core and wanted to leave it more. I don’t trust where anything is going, at all.
“We will need to be full-throated and unconditional about abortion as a necessary precondition to justice and equal rights if we want even a chance of someday getting somewhere better,” wrote Jia Tolentino in that same New Yorker article that wholly bummed me out and ruined my day.
I think that all women should sit during the Star Spangled Banner until this atrocity is reversed. Land of the Free and Home of the Brave my ASS.
Out and out rebellion, that’s what this calls for.
Fuck the SCOTUS. Until their power is revoked, none of us are safe. They’ve developed a taste for taking away your rights, and this is just the first shot fired. From now, it gets really ugly.
Artwork: “The Cobra Bride,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2019.
NEED MANUSCRIPT EDITING? EMAIL ME. Cintraw@gmail.com
I, GODLESS BABYKILLER